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Robert Parry on the media: a must-read.

Here’s something from the independent journalist Robert Parry that confirms a lot of what Dave has been saying. I clearly remember that at the beginning, Air America got an enormous amount of flak from prissy liberals, and they were ultimately less effective than they would have been if they have been able to operate in more markets — for example, in swing states like Ohio. (This link comes from Cursor’s Derelection 2004, which has a lot of other good stuff too).

Plus, the evidence is that wealthy progressives still don’t

“get it.” Even with Election 2004 looming, Air America, a promising AM radio

network to challenge Rush Limbaugh and the right-wing talk radio monopoly, was

hobbled by the refusal of rich liberals to invest in the venture. In a new book,

Road to Air America, Sheldon Drobny, one of the network’s founders, describes

his frustrating appeals to East and West Coast “limousine liberals” who didn’t

want to engage in the project.

I have encountered similar rebuffs dating back to the early 1990s, after

my experiences as a mainstream investigative journalist for the Associated Press

and Newsweek convinced me that the biggest threat to American democracy was the

growing imbalance in the national news media. Mainstream journalists were

increasingly frightened that their careers would be destroyed if they came under

attack from the Reagan-Bush administrations and their right-wing allies.

Yet, even as conservative foundations were pouring tens of millions of